Dr. Selva Selvaratnam, CEO of OpSec Security - Protecting Brands From Bad Actors

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:02) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Selva, the CEO at OpSec Security, and we discuss how OpSec is able to leverage massive amounts of data to protect brands from bad actors, benefits of being vertically integrated, and encouraging an open culture of communication. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Selva at 00:00:29) Here we go.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:30) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Selva at 00:00:41) Well, I was born in Malaysia. I came here to do my studies and stayed on after my PhD. During my PhD, actually, myself and two other lecturers left to set up a company, originally funded by the city, and that turned into me buying the company eventually and then selling it on to Assa Abloy. And I was in all the way through. I was in technology. It was smart cards and sort of the early days of smart card technology, security access control, distributed intelligence, sensor analysis and data analysis from sensors. It's those sort of areas I started to get involved in, and that's what drove me into technology. And to me, technology was always about what I can bring to a customer. It is not about the tech itself. It's about what insights it gives the customer. That's how it's always started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) Very cool.

(Selva at 00:01:38) So, you know, that was my background, and it's sort of led me into a very interesting path in life, both in terms of being an entrepreneur and also in terms of developing product and companies of my own that sort of led to customer value, as it were.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) Right. What were some of those other companies that you developed?

(Selva at 00:01:59) Well, the MR Sensors was my original company, and then I worked for HID for a while, which is part of the Assa Abloy Group. Then I worked for De La Rue, and then became CEO of OpSec just before the lockdown, which sort of makes life interesting for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) Yeah, I'm sure. That had to be pretty crazy taking the helm of a company right before such a crazy event.

(Selva at 00:02:18) That's right. I mean, it actually was, I would say, exciting. It was daunting because you're thinking, what am I going to do now? Because there's no playbook here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) Yeah.

(Selva at 00:02:30) Right? So you depend on your experience. You depend on what you want to do. And remember, companies are about people. So the first thing you do is to say, how would people want to be told what needs to happen? So the first thing that needs to happen was calmly organize the company so we don't impact our customers. So we kept all our factories open during that period. Nothing. We agreed we won't let our customers down. We very quickly allowed our employees to go home and work. We had to go out and buy hundreds of laptops in a hurry to allow people. We had desktops like most companies because we were office-bound in many ways. We had to move to laptops in many ways. So it was an organizational challenge, but I had a terrific team, and our staff were just excellent. They just stood up to that. It was a challenge, and the focus of the company was always protect our customers. And that's exactly what we did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with OpSec because we had Najaf on the podcast a little while ago. So I understand to an extent the weight of how important it was for you guys to have business continuity to continue protecting your customers. But can you give me a brief overview of what OpSec does for the listeners that might not know?

(Selva at 00:03:46) We are a company that's been around since about 1983. We started off in the OVD area, optical variable devices, which is fundamentally high-security holograms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) Got it.

(Selva at 00:04:00) To originate them, to develop them. And then we moved into scientific materials, materials that are used to secure and authenticate something. Right? So that started being applied to many, many areas, including brand. So what we started to do was to authenticate a product, a garment for instance, and then allow the licensee to track that from the factory all the way to the end user. So we have a big brand presence in that particular area. We help with automotive car parts, for instance, to identify and validate that they're not counterfeits. So we got into those markets very early on, and that sort of drove the behavior that we brought about. One, we tend to be very customer-centric, which is what excited me and attracted me to the company. They're very customer-centric. To me, it is all about the customer. So that's the piece we focused on. We also are vertically integrated. So fundamentally, we manufacture the product. We print and have the ability to track and trace it, so all the software solutions are ours. We then have online brand protection with the acquisition of MarkMonitor last January to allow us to track fraudulent products on the web and take down sites that are selling fraudulent products. We also have complementary services such as fraud, where we look at phishing attacks using a brand name and block those. We have live video on demand and peer-to-peer monitoring services that allow us to fingerprint and watermark live streams and sort of block these real-time where necessary. So it's something that protects a customer's IP in many, many ways in a 360 manner, both on product and online.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) So working in so many different verticals, you're the CEO, you're overseeing everything. How do you manage the complexity of all of that?

(Selva at 00:05:58) Actually, it sounds complex, but it isn't. Because fundamentally, if you look at what we do, the business is divided up with some very capable leaders that are driving both businesses, the online and the on-product, and they work together to drive behavior. So I'm overseeing a very capable team in the first instance. Secondly, one of the advantages we have with 360 is that we're vertically integrated. Modern supply chains are enormously complex, and there's no standard model that fits all. So because we're vertically integrated, we manufacture the product, the tags, the authentication product, the validation methods, the consumer track and trace methods, the mobile phone apps that sort of validate all of this. It gives us that enormous amount of flexibility to tailor the requirement to a large enterprise supply chain requirements.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) That makes sense.

(Selva at 00:06:54) So it becomes a very integrated delivery to demanding customers, and we become partners, become strategic alliances. We become part of their supply chain logistics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:04) Because the technologies involved with protecting digital and physical assets are, I'm sure, vastly different. So how do you make sure that these technologies work together and become more than a sum of their parts?

(Selva at 00:07:19) I think you've phrased it very well. You know, how do we become more than the sum of its parts? It's fundamentally how they work together. It's how it's perceived externally. So if I look at the products that we make, if you look at the hang tags, the OVDs, what each of them have their own characteristics. We then tie it back to a value proposition, and we have a very capable product management team that looks at the solution as a whole. And as I said before, our focus has always been, what's the customer's perspective? Where is their value? Fundamentally, where we bring value is whilst we do all of these things ground up, right, and we allow them to track and trace, we collect an enormous amount of data. It is how do we present this data in a sensible manner and take action on it and allow our customers to take action on it, which is driving the technology forefronts that we look at. So to do that, we have whole teams that work on material science, you know, from taggants down to glues, down to security foils, down to how to originate a hologram and how you put it down, how you use UV inks to sort of protect something, how do you put in covert markings and overt markings on devices to sort of bring it through? How do you validate it using your mobile phone? How do you then feed that back into the cloud? And the whole thing becomes a solution that is integrated and flexible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) Wow. That's a lot.

(Selva at 00:08:47) Yes, that is a lot. And that then ties into, as you get into the data realm, you then start to talk about, you know, how do you bring machine learning to bear? How do you bring machine learning and artificial intelligence to bear to make the analysis of that vast amounts of data easier?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:02) Yeah, just earlier this week, I was interviewing a guy named Steven Davis. He's a VP of Technology at Innodata. Have you heard of Innodata?

(Selva at 00:09:12) No, I haven't, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) So they clean large datasets to make them work better for training AI models. And they also provide data extraction and annotation tools. So you could just load up a 500-page legal document, and it can pull out the data points from the document, annotate those, and make it just really make a lot of sense in training the algorithm and also help keep the algorithm explainable as it's running, which I think is super cool. And I was just curious, like, you're talking about how vertically integrated you guys are and you're running your own machine learning algorithms. You're collecting all of this data. Do you have a whole data science team that's focused on—

(Selva at 00:10:01) No. I mean, we work in two ways. We know the limitations of where we can go. So what we tend to do is we have data science team that guide where we want to go, then we work with best-in-class partners out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) Nice. Okay, cool.

(Selva at 00:10:15) Okay. So it's always a combination of what we can do and what we can buy. It's make versus buy is our critical decision. Our input is we don't have to own everything to give our customers the very best service. So we've always sort of chose best-in-class to integrate into a solution to sort of get us to where we want to go. And you talk about all these technologies. These technologies are invested in by many, many firms. We work with some of them to sort of bring everything to the fore, as it were.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:44) It sounds like build versus buy is a decision that you come across very often in your day-to-day. What are some of the key points that you consider and put a lot of weight behind when you're making those decisions?

(Selva at 00:10:57) Well, we've put a lot of weight behind this. There are areas in which there are vast amounts of money being spent by other companies who have had a head start for 20 years. They are not in the space we are in. Right? So they're not competitors, but we can use their knowledge to enhance what our customers see. So the fundamental becomes, how quickly can I bring something to market? Is it quicker by buying it in? Is it quicker by us developing it? How strategically important is it? So if it's strategically important, we may consider part of it being in-house, but always, we have a lot of experts in-house that help guide the process. So whether it's internal or external, we have large dataset teams. We have large engineering teams looking at this, working with the partners that we bring in where necessary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:43) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You don't want to spend a lot of time on something that's not your core competency.

(Selva at 00:11:49) No. And, you know, it's also being driven by market behavior as time goes. So if you look at where we are going now, right, there's a lot of dynamics in the marketplace, and environmental and social is one of them. ESG is becoming an important part of what companies do. Sustainability has always been at the forefront of what we did. Right? So, you know, that is driving supply chain behavior and on-product behavior. You want to know where your products come from, but you not only want to know your product is not a fake, but you also want to know that the components that it's made of come from sustainable sources.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:26) Yeah, absolutely.

(Selva at 00:12:27) So that's driving through. Sustainability is driving requirements like right to repair. In other words, you don't want to throw things away. You want to fix them. If you want to fix them, you need to be able to buy viable, genuine spare parts. So how do you know this spare part is genuine? Right? So all of this is driving certain behavior that we sort of hook into and ensure our customers have the ability to sort of work in an ever-changing world as we start to bring our products to marketplace. So it's evolving constantly, and we're evolving with the supply chain requirements that come with it. And if you look at the online side of things, if you look at products, you know, products that are brought to market across multiple channels, right? We monitor pricing. We monitor fake goods. We monitor where it's going. We can take down sites that are fraudulent as we come along. And now our network intelligence model, which is in its third generation, because of our depth of knowledge and the number of customers in particular verticals, let's say the sports vertical, we're starting to tie bad actors together. Bad actors don't work in one vertical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:35) Yeah.

(Selva at 00:13:35) Right? They don't use the same name, but you will find that their IP address is the same, or their server origination is the same, or their telephone numbers are the same, but the name is different. So we begin to map this across multiple industries that gives our customers far greater insights and across multiple channels. So it gives our customers far greater insights as to what is possible to enforce, to take down, and to sort of protect their IP.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:04) So I want to circle back to the supply chain tracking. That sounds super interesting. Is that something that you guys offer as a service?

(Selva at 00:14:11) Yes, it is. I mean, we work in two areas there. We work in the commercial area, but we manage licensing and trademarks that allows people to license their IP. And then buy hang tags that they hang on garments that we then trace through the system if they want to, right through to the consumer. We also work in tax stamps. Now tax stamps are interesting. We deal in tobacco, so governments want to license to control its use, and they want to tax tobacco. So tobacco, beer, alcohol, sweet soft drinks. All of these things, there are tax stamps that have to be put on them. It's like money. Right? You then want to be able to track it all the way through the supply chain, aggregate and disaggregate as it goes through the various channels. So you might have a pallet full of stuff that then breaks up into boxes of stuff that breaks out in individual packets. You need to be able to track and trace all of this. You want customer and enforcement agents to be able to scan any of these using their mobile phone and check how valid it is and where it came from. So all of this is something we do. And because we do it for governments, we bring a great deal of credibility to the commercial and enterprise space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:23) That makes sense. I mean, yeah, the governments are definitely going to put a higher bar on the security than a lot of the commercial space.

(Selva at 00:15:31) That's correct. I mean, if you look at our factories, you know, we have anti-rambas. We meet all our security requirements. They meet government security requirements for us to be able to bid for government contracts. And it is those very same sites that manufacture everything from our enterprise customers to the same standards and to the same security levels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:49) So when you're tracking these products through the supply chain, do you work with an external partner that decides along the way at each place where the product stops, like, is this plant sustainable? Yes. So who decides that?

(Selva at 00:16:06) No. The IP owners decide that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:09) Got it.

(Selva at 00:16:10) So the partners who own the brand will decide how much tracking. Some of them don't want anything at all. They want to know it's manufactured and it's sold. That's all they want to know—two endpoints. Others want to know where it is in between.

(Selva at 00:16:20) What we were capable of doing, any of these things, and it depends on what the owners want. And as time goes forward, these requirements are becoming more and more sophisticated. And the fact that we all carry a mobile phone these days is actually making it a lot easier for people to validate and scan all of this equipment. If you go back twenty, thirty years, you need to have specialist equipment that makes it even more difficult.

(Selva at 00:16:43) That's no longer the case, right? We all carry a mobile computing platform with us most days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) Yeah. We're able to scan a QR code, get all the information we need.

(Selva at 00:16:52) Well, not just a QR code. You can look at RFID tags. You can look at non-fungible tags that we can look at. We can look at encrypted QR codes. We've got a whole range of technologies.

(Selva at 00:17:06) And this is the other thing. Technology is there to serve a purpose, right? It's not there to drive behavior, right?

(Selva at 00:17:14) So we use the technology to serve our customers the best it can, and it's a jigsaw we fit together. So our platforms are set up in such a way so you can pick how you want to drive things through. And we have the flexibility to incorporate whatever you want. More security, less security, greater veracity of traceability or less veracity of traceability. All of these are things that our customers can choose and can build up over time, because a customer's needs don't stay stagnant.

(Selva at 00:17:41) It varies all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) Yeah. So I know earlier you mentioned that you do a lot of work with governments and in the commercial sector. What are some of the major differences that you've encountered from working with both?

(Selva at 00:17:56) Well, I think there's more similarities than differences, actually. Big corporations have very similar requirements. They tend to run similar bidding processes. They want partners they can work with. They look for quality of delivery.

(Selva at 00:18:10) The difference with governments is they drive particular behavior in their longer-term contracts. With commercial enterprises, they want a partner they can work with, and they tend to be more fluid in their requirements.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:22) Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the tech behind it, and because earlier you mentioned NFTs, and I know that there's a lot of talk about blockchain in general for being able to offer higher security and protection.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40) But I wanted to get your perspective of what are some technologies that you're really optimistic about improving brand protection, and what are some that you're more skeptical of?

(Selva at 00:18:52) I think if you look at blockchain, for instance, distributed ledgers, distributed ledgers have a role, but they slow things up, right? So fundamentally, they have a role in certain areas. They actually bring an advantage, but in many areas, they don't. So we tend to apply these technologies where it is relevant, not because we want a sound bite that says we'll be using blockchain.

(Selva at 00:19:16) Right? That's one. The other one is we tend to adopt technologies that I'm excited about. RFID in the supply chain is going to change things, right? The ability to automatically verify what is happening online is going to change things. Network intelligence, our ability to map what is happening right across multiple industries and particular customers—you can look at the garment for a particular licensee, and then you can look at what's happening in that industry. Then you can look at that whole vertical and say, here are the same actors appearing in multiple places. So if I take this actor down, I'm actually protecting five brands in one go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:53) Yeah. That's crazy.

(Selva at 00:19:55) Right? So it is that ability to correlate the data that is most exciting me. So data manipulation, data analytics, and the ability to display that in a sensible fashion is probably our most exciting area of development.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) That's really—okay, this is all making sense to me now, how when you are able to take down one actor, you're protecting a lot of different people across a lot of different verticals. That really ties back into becoming more than a sum of your parts, being able to leverage the data from both the physical and the digital assets, because I'm sure there's a lot of people that are doing both.

(Selva at 00:20:32) Yes. Absolutely right. And it's the ability to link data to form a picture of what is happening—that is the one thing that has changed over the last three or four years. At one time, it was point deliveries. You know, here's online. Here's the fake website. I'll take it down. If you look at it carefully, that is fed by multiple other points and multiple other channels. So we're looking at it across multiple channels now, across multiple platforms, and then tackling it as a holistic problem rather than a point problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:02) So when you guys find a fraudulent site, how do you go about taking it down? Is it a matter of reporting it to the authorities, or do you have a team of hackers?

(Selva at 00:21:11) Well, we have the links into authorities. We have an investigative services arm that we're putting together now. We have relationships with all the main platforms that help us take it down. We have a relationship with enforcement agencies that help us take it down, and all of these things tie together. I'll give you an example.

(Selva at 00:21:28) One of the things we do is fraud. Now fraud is about phishing, for instance. Now most people talk about phishing and say, I'm going to steal something from you, right, Steven? I'm going to send you an email that pretends to be DHL. You click on it. That will infect your computer. But what we're interested in is the name DHL is being used right across the board, so we protect the brand owner and block it. So, you know, multiple DHL emails coming from this one server, we'll block that server, or we'll take it down. And remember, phishing is illegal.

(Selva at 00:21:56) Yeah. So it's a mandate that we can go to the ISP with and kick that server down, right? So, you know, it is about offering that holistic service. So if you look at brand protection, they want the on-product piece of the equation. They want the online piece of the equation. They want the content piece of the equation. They want the live content piece of that equation. We do all of those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:20) So when you find people that are counterfeiting physical goods, what does that look like to take them down?

(Selva at 00:22:27) It's very simple. I mean, we can report it through. We can help identify the goods itself. We will move into investigative services again to talk to enforcement officers to try and take these things off the market. And it depends where in the world you are.

(Selva at 00:22:43) If you look at the U.S., you know, and Europe, there are rules that help us enforce these very quickly. If you get into other parts of the world, it is more difficult. But, you know, it depends how far the brand wants to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:56) Do you have any fun stories of busting big operations?

(Selva at 00:23:00) No. Not ones I would openly talk about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Right. Yes. Of course.

(Selva at 00:23:05) Yeah. There's stories that can be told, but not ones I would openly talk about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:10) Yep. Yep. So do you work with protecting films and movies from piracy and stuff as well?

(Selva at 00:23:21) So live stuff, video on demand—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) Yeah.

(Selva at 00:23:24) And peer-to-peer are ones that we work with. So for instance, during all the sports events that are taking place, we were monitoring those sports events. So if things are copied and put into platforms that they shouldn't be going into, we will block it real time. We can detect as many as ten to twenty frames and block it, because we fingerprint these things. It's real-time events of this nature that actually work for us.

(Selva at 00:23:47) And it's the same with films. It's the same with peer-to-peer-type devices. So we have technologies that do this live. We have very experienced customer service managers and analysts who link it all together. To be honest, when you look at something like this, what we offer, you tend to think it's the tech. Actually, it isn't. It is how you apply the technology together with machine learning, together with AI, together with the human skill to be able to interpret, together with the explanation, together with linking it together to form a service. It is that whole process that we excel at. And technology is a huge enabler. It is, don't get me wrong.

(Selva at 00:24:28) It is the cornerstone of what we do, but it is about the service we deliver, right, particularly in the live space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:37) Yeah. The live space sounds really, really difficult because you only have the two hours that the sporting event is going on for.

(Selva at 00:24:45) Absolutely. Yeah. So, and we cover this globally. We have live events that take place, and we've got people in China, in Japan, in the UK. So it's follow-the-sun-type technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:57) Wow. That's really cool. So I'm sure that also really strengthens your team having such a wide variety of perspectives.

(Selva at 00:25:06) It creates challenges. You've got to have people who are prepared to work on weekends, in the middle of the night. You have a flexible workforce that's excited by this. You have technologists that can apply what is required technology-wise, and we work actively with our customers doing these things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:22) So being such a large company, how do you overcome the inertia of just the size of your company to be able to stay nimble and adapt to all these new technologies, and especially new techniques that counterfeiters are implementing? Because I'm sure that changes really fast.

(Selva at 00:25:42) Well, it does change, and it's something we constantly monitor. Look, most companies have this ability to adapt if you have a workforce that is designed to understand what needs to happen quickly. So we have clear responsibilities in each of the functions. Product management interacts in a particular way.

(Selva at 00:26:02) We talk to our customers when we need to. And our customers are our greatest source of information. And to me, the cornerstone of what we do is customer centricity. We've got to be close to our customers. We've got to meet their requirements and understand that this is not about us pushing a technology. It's providing an exemplary service.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:22) So you've also been around for a long time, like forty years, right?

(Selva at 00:26:27) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:27) So I'm sure a lot of your competitors in the space are new cropping-up companies. How do you leverage your experience from being around longer as an advantage?

(Selva at 00:26:40) Well, it's not just about the veracity of our system. So remember, this is not about a single product that is delivered, right? Here is a hologram. I'm done. I've done my job, right? This is about, here's the hologram. Here's how it fits onto something. Here's how the integrations are designed. Here's how the covert and overt markings go in place. Here's how the track and trace works with it. It is that whole holistic three-sixty solution that people need to start to look at.

(Selva at 00:27:06) That is very difficult to replicate. There are people who will replicate a piece of it, but do you know what? If you're an enterprise that wants a holistic end-to-end solution, we are one of the very few providers out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:21) That makes sense.

(Selva at 00:27:21) So it's that piece that differentiates us, right? And we stay nimble because we are divided up into various departments that look at things in their own right. They own their own piece, right?

(Selva at 00:27:34) It's in software, it's like running a microservices-organized software stack, right? So everything is doing its own thing but working together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:44) Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So I want to talk a little bit about your leadership approach at your company being so vertically integrated. How do you make sure—how do you encourage a culture of being open and communicating so that all these—

(Selva at 00:28:00) That's a continuing journey because we've just acquired another business. Every time we acquire a business, there's an upheaval in the culture and things need to work through. So the cultural changes are taking place as quickly as we can. We encourage an openness and also calculated risk-taking. We don't get into a blame culture.

(Selva at 00:28:18) You know, we're going to get things wrong. If we do, it is analyze, correct, iterate, move forward. And that's the quick decision-making process that we tend to go through. And we're putting processes in place that allow people to make decisions further down the line as much as they can. So it's about iterating to a company that is flexible.

(Selva at 00:28:39) Are we there yet? We never will be. I've never been in a business that says, I'm done, right? We're going to keep improving. We're going to keep taking away at it. And do we have a way to go? Absolutely. So, you know, it's a continuing journey, and it's a journey I'm excited to be on. And you know what?

(Selva at 00:28:54) There's a whole lot of new people that have come into the business because we're growing aggressively. And as we grow, we're starting to apply the technologies and the learnings we have from where we're launching. In the last two years, during COVID, we've launched more new products than we have in the last three years, because we're pushing the boundaries now to push where we want to go and how we want to bring things forward. We made sure our customers were protected, and all of these things are important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) So would you say COVID was kind of a catalyst for you guys for being more comfortable taking risks and trying new things?

(Selva at 00:29:28) I wouldn't say it was a catalyst. I think we acquired a whole new part of our business just before the lockdown.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:35) Oh, right. Yeah.

(Selva at 00:29:36) So yeah. So that drove the requirement to be more innovative, to link together, to start working differently to get where we want to get to. And what did COVID do? It did force us to look at our work practices. You know, we had to move from being a very factory and office-orientated approach to moving home but still maintaining our customers.

(Selva at 00:30:00) So our factory stayed open all the way through. At the same time, our analysts and our CSMs had to work from home. Now they begin to come back in a more flexible way. We've moved our systems to allow for that flexible working because we're going to have to. So it's forced certain behaviors.

(Selva at 00:30:16) Now what the future holds, I don't know. What I do know is that we'll be flexible about it. We will learn as we go along. It's that learn, adapt, iterate. Learn, adapt, iterate that we'll keep doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) Nice. So how are things going to be different going forward coming out of the pandemic for just the way you operate?

(Selva at 00:30:36) Well, I think, first of all, we've got to work out how we come back to work, right? And whether we come back to work full-time, whether we go to a flexible working model, whether it's a hybrid. Honestly, I don't know. There's no playbook here.

(Selva at 00:30:49) So as we went into the lockdown, we will have to come out of it being flexible again. It is that one factor that's kept us going, that flexibility. But the complete focus is what's best for our customers. How do we best serve our customers? If it means we're in the office all the time, we will be in the office all the time.

(Selva at 00:31:07) So how do we best serve our customers? That's got to be the focus of what we want to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) Right. Yeah. At the end of the day, you've got to keep customer experience first and foremost.

(Selva at 00:31:18) That's right. It's about the experience. Actually, you bring up a very good point. It's not about what you just present to them. It's about the experience they have in interacting with you as a business.

(Selva at 00:31:29) The technology gives them the advantages that they want, and their insights and the analysis we bring to it gives them the ability to predict what is gonna happen. Our job is to be the front line wherever we need to be, and we try to be that wherever we can. Are we progressing as we want to? I wanna be faster. It's never fast enough, but we're going as fast as we can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:52) Yeah. And I love when I hear things from different people that just line up exactly, and I know it as a truth at that point. Because a little while ago, we had on Colleen, the CIO of Zendesk, and she was talking about how she's always incredibly focused on customer experience and a great way to get there is by first making your employee experience as good as possible. And then in turn, they will improve the customer experience because they're happy and engaged. And it sounds like you're also really focused on both of those things, and that's just a recipe for success.

(Selva at 00:32:29) Yes. I mean, we're going through an integration. We're going through a cultural change as we sort of work our way through as we become more and more of a software business. Because, you know, a great part of our revenue now is software based. And we're becoming a software company, so the dynamics of what we do needs to change.

(Selva at 00:32:48) And therefore, there's a cultural change going on. And this is something that is gathering momentum as we start to work our way forward. And we work across a huge part of the globe, which is exposing us to different cultural nuances and ability to be flexible. And do you know what? All of this adds to our ability to be global.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) Yeah. So when you open into a new part of the globe, what's your strategy for learning the work culture and making sure your employees that you hire there are feeling welcome in the company as a whole?

(Selva at 00:33:27) Well, that's always a very difficult thing to do, and what we tend to do—I mean, we just opened up offices in Vietnam. We're looking at India. We're looking at other parts of the world as we do that. It's finding the leaders that lead the site that's the most important thing you need to do. So once you find the leaders, that sets the culture for the site and sort of keeps things going.

(Selva at 00:33:47) We've hired a CHRO that's driving the normal disciplines of HR within the business. You know, here are the job hierarchies. Here's how we—learning and development is becoming a key to what we do. So we start to work our way forward. How do we keep our employees constantly engaged in learning? Right? So all of these things are—and how do you reward them when we all do well? We either all do well together or we don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) Exactly. So speaking of learning and development, if you were to provide the best leadership training possible for your direct reports, what would the first and foremost one or two concepts be?

(Selva at 00:34:31) What would I gain from my experience? One, it's about honesty. And what do I mean by honesty? I don't mean, you know, you're stealing something. I'm talking about honesty in delivering a message. In other words, see it as it is, deliver on your promises. Right? And when you can't, ask for help. So if you follow those principles, I think you'll be fine. Right?

(Selva at 00:34:54) As a leader, honesty is probably your strongest element.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) Yeah.

(Selva at 00:35:01) Right? Now people can mistake honesty. You're very direct. I tend to be direct because I'd rather say it as it is. Right? But nothing is ever negative. You know, everything is about managing your way out of an issue. So it's about stating the problem, talking through what needs to happen to put it right, and then calmly working your way forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) Yeah. When you're being honest and transparent, it's not about whether something's positive or negative. You're just stating the facts and keeping everyone on the same page so that they can best address the problem at hand or best move the company forward.

(Selva at 00:35:39) Yeah. I mean, you know the saying. Right? There's no such thing as bad news or good news. That's just early or late.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) No. I have not heard that before. That makes a lot of sense, though.

(Selva at 00:35:51) Yes. So, you know—sorry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) So I was just gonna ask, what are you learning right now as a leader?

(Selva at 00:36:00) I'm learning that as a business, a business is infinitely flexible if you lead it correctly. Right? And when I look back at what COVID has taught us to do, I'm amazed by what the team has achieved. It's not me. I provide direction, but it's the team that's done all of this. So I'm amazed by what my staff have done. I'm eternally grateful. They are the ones that are making this happen and taking it to the next level. We now need to focus on where our future goes as we start to grow even further. So the thing I've learned is, one, if you focus on the customer and get your staff rallying around it, you will come through almost any adversity.

(Selva at 00:36:43) Two, as you start to integrate technology, and technology is what we were doing—we integrated a whole new business during COVID. Right? And this couldn't be done without communication. And, you know, I'm just thinking, if this had happened 25 years ago without video conferencing, without all the technologies we have now, it'd be a very different outcome.

(Selva at 00:37:04) Yeah. The technologies that have enabled us to do what we need to do are astounding. It'll therefore inform us as we come out of this. Do we go back to that, I'm gonna go and visit the US every three weeks, or I'm gonna go and visit the UK? I don't think we will. I think the technology has forced us to reevaluate how we use technology to drive where we wanna go to without going back to the old behaviors that we have. And we'll have to evaluate where this takes us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:37) Yeah. I mean, if you can avoid tons of travel expenses and time spent on planes, why wouldn't you?

(Selva at 00:37:46) Yeah. And don't get me wrong. Right? I think the human touch is important. So what we're doing now where there's no travel at all doesn't work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) Yeah. It's not sustainable long term to not travel at all. But it is really great to see that we can do it less.

(Selva at 00:38:03) That's correct. I think that's a good way of putting it, that traveling as much as we used to doesn't need to go back to what it was. But at the same time, I think there's a bit of catching up to do because for a year, there's been no travel. So I think there'll be a bump where we're all trying to get caught up, as it were.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Yeah. Nothing's ever linear. It's always—

(Selva at 00:38:23) Not linear. It always goes up and down, but that's the way it's gonna be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:28) So you mentioned that as we're coming out of the pandemic, you're finally able to look forward to the future and figure out what to do next. What are you really excited about for the future?

(Selva at 00:38:39) I'm excited about how we're gonna apply the new products that we're bringing out is gonna link everything together. And I'm excited about how we're gonna be driving that vision as we start to work out. Our 360 view of brand is what I'm excited about because this is truly beginning to take shape. We're beginning to link the data that we want. We're beginning to put online and offline together. Our customers are beginning to see how that works for them. It is putting that—bringing that vision to life that I'm really excited about. And it's driven by technology, by process, by capabilities, by what our customers are seeing. It's a combination of all these things, and all of these things are what makes different chasers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:23) Very well said. Well, before we wrap up, is there anything else that we wanna get out there that we didn't get to touch on yet today?

(Selva at 00:39:31) No. I think, look, I think we are heading into a very exciting world, a world where sustainability is gonna become more important. Our online presences are gonna become far more important. Our points of origin of bits and pieces are gonna be here, and that's gonna drive our behavior in the coming years. Right? There's a time of change. The automotive industry is gonna change substantially, and change produces opportunities and risks, but opportunities mainly in my book. And our focus is going to be how do we help the organization go where it needs to go? How do we help our enterprise customers do what they need to do? And how do we drive that ESG message through all the way through?

(Intro Narrator at 00:40:15) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.